Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: the weight of finance in European societies
- 2 Banking and industrialization: Rondo Cameron twenty years on
- Part I FINANCIAL SECTOR AND ECONOMY
- Part II FINANCIAL ELITES AND SOCIETY
- Part III FINANCIAL INTERESTS AND POLITICS
- 11 The influence of the City over British economic policy, c.1880–1960
- 12 The political influence of bankers and financiers in France in the years, 1850–1960
- 13 Banks and banking in Germany after the First World War: strategies of defence
- 14 Banks and bankers in the German interwar depression
- 15 Finance and politics: comments
- Part IV FINANCE AND FINANCIERS IN SMALLER EUROPEAN COUNTRIES
- Part V THE RISE OF EXTRA-EUROPEAN FINANCIAL CENTRES
- Index
13 - Banks and banking in Germany after the First World War: strategies of defence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: the weight of finance in European societies
- 2 Banking and industrialization: Rondo Cameron twenty years on
- Part I FINANCIAL SECTOR AND ECONOMY
- Part II FINANCIAL ELITES AND SOCIETY
- Part III FINANCIAL INTERESTS AND POLITICS
- 11 The influence of the City over British economic policy, c.1880–1960
- 12 The political influence of bankers and financiers in France in the years, 1850–1960
- 13 Banks and banking in Germany after the First World War: strategies of defence
- 14 Banks and bankers in the German interwar depression
- 15 Finance and politics: comments
- Part IV FINANCE AND FINANCIERS IN SMALLER EUROPEAN COUNTRIES
- Part V THE RISE OF EXTRA-EUROPEAN FINANCIAL CENTRES
- Index
Summary
Well before historians interested in the economic growth of latedeveloping nations celebrated the contributions of German banks to German industrial development and other historians raised questions about how long the universal banks of the German type played the key role ascribed to them by Hilferding, Lenin and Gerschenkron, German economic commentators cast a very sober look at the historical course being taken by Germany's bankers and banking system. Not perchance, some of the most significant observations were made at the end of 1923, when a near decade of profound economic instability brought on by war, revolution and inflation was coming to its tumultuous end and the time for an effort at genuine accounting had begun.
Thus, the editor of Plutus, Georg Bernhard, in an article of December 1923, had no doubt about the fact that Germany's extraordinary economic development in the past century had:
firstly to be ascribed to the fruitful activity of the great German universal banks.… This achievement of the German banks, to have created a rich capitalistic cultural nation out of an unfruitful, barren soil in a surprisingly short period must be repeatedly emphasized in the face of the many attacks which have been made against the German banking system for decades.
And yet, he also felt obligated to say that ‘the majority of German banks, since they had grown beyond a certain extent, have distanced themselves further and further from the pioneering activity of their first decades’. Enterprising bankers of the old stamp had given way to administrators, and, even before the war, the initiative had been seized by ‘flexible industrialists’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Finance and Financiers in European History 1880–1960 , pp. 243 - 262Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991